Unknown individuals calling themselves the “Tunisian Fallaga Team” hacked into the website of the Venice Jewish community’s library and archive and posted pro-Islamist and pro-Palestinian messages on its home page. Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, the director of the Renato Maestro Library and Archive, called the incident Monday “in effect, a violent and targeted threat, of a…
In Venice, my wife and I like to stay in the old ghetto, which sits in ideal proximity to sundry picturesque attractions, yet somehow feels insulated and tucked away. My hunch is that the neighborhood’s name, despite its antiquated origin, keeps away the riffraff. “This is where your people used to live,” my wife, Francesca,…
A court in Venice upheld a decision by Italian authorities to expel former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke from the country. The decision issued Dec. 5, on the heels of Duke’s expulsion by police in the northern province of Belluno, said Duke planned “to establish an organization aiming to exterminate the black and Jewish…
Every time I bite into a slice of noodle kugel, I am reminded of another baked pasta dish: frisinsal, an unusual, savory and just slightly sweet recipe that we make back home in Venice around Tu B’shvat (the New year of Trees). For the Jews of Northern Italy, no recipe recalls the past as much…
Isaac Pollak of New York City has sent me a photograph from his private Judaica collection of a late 18th-century engraving by an Italian artist named Giovanni del Pian. Part of it, showing several men emerging from a house to lower a wooden coffin with Hebrew lettering into a gondola, appears alongside this column. At…
Israeli actress Hadas Yaron has won the 69th Venice Film Festival’s award for best actress. Yaron received the award Saturday for her role in haredi Orthodox Israeli director Rama Burshtein’s film “Lemale et Ha’chalal” (Fill the Void), a family story set in Tel Aviv’s Hasidic community. Yaron plays Shira, an 18-year-old girl set to enter…
According to Don Harrán, Sarra Copia Sulam was the first Italian Jewish woman to “excel” as a public literary figure, writing in various forms and leaving a “personal imprint on them.” She was a kind of Susan Sontag of the Venetian Ghetto. Sulam was also prominent because of her beauty and wealth (her husband was…
